


The Hermit

by rosncrntz



Category: Arcadia - Stoppard
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Hermitage, Memory Loss, One Shot, Post-Arcadia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 14:37:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12459849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosncrntz/pseuds/rosncrntz
Summary: Septimus Hodge lives in the hermitage at the end of the garden to a house he can no longer remember the name of. Haunted by the voice of a girl he cannot remember. Recalling a time forgotten. Working through sums he doesn't understand. Trying to prove her right.





	The Hermit

She had predicted the end of the world: but could not have foreseen the end of his.

In a hermitage at the end of a garden to a house he could no longer know the name of. Not for sure. He remembered having known it for years but one day he must have woken up with some vague notion that he was mistaken all this time, and from there the memory only became fuzzier, like the dew on the grass in the morning as it meets the fog which burns away by midday every day without fail. He would count the hours if he had a clock or a measure of time besides the sun and moon – for he was sure that it was precisely midday every day when the fog burns away, on the dot, when the sun is it its very apex. He saw it, unclouding over the house: the house he did not know the name of.

But he knew facts. Figures. He knew numbers. Yes, he knew numbers. He knew how to plot numbers on lines, grids, and how to join the numbers into more lines, from lines into curves, from curves into spirals, spirals to shapes, to pictures, to forms, to life itself. That is what she has said – life, curves, leaves. No, he did not know that. She had known that, and he was drawing patterns he couldn’t comprehend, working on instructions he hadn’t understood, scrabbling at a stone wall with bleeding fingernails. 

When he ran out of paper – which took less time than he’d expected (she would have known how long it would take, always ahead, always cleverer) – he decided the walls would do. A flint as a chalk – how long had it been since he’d used chalk? – and the stone as his workspace. In his sleep, he saw the curves he’d formed that day, and sleep did nothing but unravel his work. He’d wake up, hazy, in pain, and he’d forget where he was. He’d forget what he’d been thinking last night. He’d forget how the leaf had trembled in the forefront of his mind. The numbers would be fuzzy like the fog and the name of the house. And the shapes would haunt him, tease him.

Was it a crime? Was he a vandal? Did he even own the ground he walked on? No, of course he didn’t. Who owns the world? Who burns the sun? Who is to blame?

It seemed she was. For she was the voice in his head, and the first thought of his waking hour. Was that what it meant to be a God? A Goddess? She had it in her power to create forms of life: the very veins that bled for her, the bower that gave shade in the heat of the sun – fear no more – and the great lumber was in her command to form and shape. She had unlocked secrets that Gods were privy to. Perhaps she had originated them. Perhaps she was never real. Never really there. Perhaps she had never existed.

What proof had he that she had ever lived? How could he even be sure? He awoke every day to trembling coldness, and worked in blistering heat, and fell asleep with only the memory of a girl. She could be fiction.

No. Of course she wasn’t. Nothing had ever been more real than Thomasina Coverly. He could see it: a dip in the square form of the house without a name where the roof had once been. Lady Croom should have had it mended by now. It was an eyesore. It reeked of smoke, still. Perhaps that was where the mist came from. The mist was not a fog at all but the smoke which had sucked the air from those small lungs was still persisting. But when he glanced out from his work to see the collapsed brick and tile where her room had been, where her body had been, he was reminded of her, and how real she had been.

But the rest of her had been swallowed in fire. Not just her perishable body: as delicate as a flower, it seemed. But the very memory of her was becoming ashen and it stung his eyes as smoke would. He could remember her name, and the cadence of her voice, though barely any words remained of her rich vocabulary (for rich he assumed it was).

_Embrace. Excite. Come._

Three words which had drilled themselves into his subconscious. And, a fourth:

_Septimus._

The only way he still remembered his own name was through the recollection of her having said it. Many times. She said it with such sweetness that his own wretched title seemed a miracle. His own name, so base and dull as the mettle which formed his now dishevelled being, became the greatest discovery of the age, the most beautiful story, the opening swell of a waltz, the mathematical formula to eternal life. She made him sound like a poem and a cure, when he knew his life was little and meagre in her great light.

Yes. He could remember that. A light. A great, pale light. The light was not akin to any particulars of the face: he could not recall a strand of hair, a colour of an iris, or the blush of a cheek. But a light that emerged from her as a colour from an opening bud.

He had touched that light, once. He could remember that. And it seemed to burn on his hands, still. He wondered how many layers of skin she had scorched, and now long they would ache.

And he had kissed it, too.

That memory came to him after years. He had never remembered forgetting it, but one morning he awoke and remembered it. He wept.

After the kiss, new memories came like sparks, unwelcome friends knocking at the hermitage where he had bundled himself and hid himself in leaves and leaves of work. He remembered a great, roaring cry. An awful sound. A sound that gave him nightmares, for weeks, sweating nightmares that woke one from complacent sleep and send one groaning into fits that poured out on to wet grass. He came back to his senses, lying on his back, the stars above him mocking his worklessness. He didn’t have their secrets. He couldn’t work out their secrets. She had died with the secrets locked in her skull, and all he had to show for her endless mind was a night of screaming and bloodied fingernails. The scream was her name. A mother’s cry, out in the garden, watching as the roof fell in and another great roar was given by the fire in return. A reply. Then another, the mother’s, Lady Croom’s cry.

_Thomasina. Thomasina._

And he hadn’t cried. He hadn’t roared against the flames. He had not moved. But, numbed, pointless even in that, he had stood muttering. He could not remember what. He had not even cried. But watched as Lady Croom screeched. And the girl was turned to smoke. And the smoke rose, and choked, and touched the very clouds.

She is in the sky, he thought. He could remember thinking it. She is far above us, now, in the clouds. She has touched the universe. She is the fibres of the stars.

But the stars that canopied above him as he lay on his back in the dark and the wet after a nightmare did not have the light that he remembered of his young mistress. The light was cold and distant. She had such warmth.

Had she? Was it warmth? He could not remember. Perhaps she was as cold as these stars. Perhaps she had always been that distant to him. He was remembering incorrectly. How could he even be sure she had existed?

He must have fallen asleep on the grass. The sun wrenched his eyelids open at the break of day as the birds sang. Was there a formula to the birds’ songs? She would have known. Were the notes pre-dictated by the rules of nature, that the next note is higher than the last? Could one map the notes and therefore always know the next one to sound, to the very pitch? She would have known. He was like a sponge, and his jacket – what was left of his jacket for it had gotten a great many holes – had swelled up with the dew and the rain and he caught a chill.

He was unable to work for weeks. If he was mapping the weeks correctly. It could have been a month, perhaps. Or only a few hours. But he knew that he was bound to idleness and death, for a time, seemed to be imminent, though his mind had never been a medical one, and the symptoms of death were alien to him. He was feeling wretched: he knew that much. He was shivering. And he was sure that there was a friend with him, who had lived with him for some time, but that was only a hallucination, a trick or a fancy of an ill mind.

Was he mad? Or was this an illness? Or are illnesses and madnesses one and the same? Heaven forbid he was mad. A madman cannot do sums, or compute numbers, or plot lines and curves. A madman cannot create shapes in God’s image. A madman cannot predict the apocalypse. A madman cannot foresee the end of time, and warn people, and have people listen. A madman could not finish what she had started.

If he were mad indeed, he would have failed entirely.

Unless madness was the first step to genius. But that would have made Thomasina Coverly mad. And she was further from mad than the hermit of Sidley Park was to Septimus Hodge. Septimus Hodge was a gentleman. A scientist. A mathematician. A scholar. The friend of a poet. A lover. A man. Sane and steady.

The Sidley Park hermit was a roving thing, crippled with nightmares and illnesses and madnesses and the spirit of a dead girl.

He could not remember which one he was anymore. But heaven forbid he was mad.

Thomasina would know. Thomasina would know who he was. She would tell him who he was: in a voice as gentle and bright as the mornings in the springtime, when the sun isn’t oppressive, and the birds aren’t loud, and the wind is cooling and soft, and the numbers and sums are coming easily to him. She would tell him as if it were obvious – she was so very clever – and she would laugh as she said it. She would say,

“You are the hermit!” or “You are Septimus!” and he would believe every word of it, whatever she said. And he would finally know who he was, again: who this brain belonged to and whether the body was a match for it.

But she was not here. At least, not in person, in body or spirit. Only the memory of her persisted, as the smell of smoke did, and the illness which was only now beginning to ease its grip and allow him to work again. He worked with fury, night and day, night and day, in pursuit of a goal that escaped from him. The closer he got to it, the further it ran, and all the while he could hear her silvery laugh in his ear. It’s easy, Septimus: it would seem to say. Just do what I would do!

He couldn’t do what she would do. He hadn’t the brain for it. He didn’t understand it. So he laboured over numbers until his head felt like it would burst. Knowledge. Proof. That was all he needed. Numbers. Someone to listen. The world had to know. She was right. She was a genius. She died young, but she was here! She existed! She lived! And she was beautiful!

One day, however, the voice returned to him, and stopped him. Knowledge was good, and she had it, and she had coveted it, but she had never lost sight of love and beauty and pleasure.

He had worked himself down to his bones: without love, without beauty, without pleasure.

And, then, immaculately, he remembered her kiss more vividly than before. How soft it had been. How inexperienced, but how pure. How noble. How infinite. How blessed he had felt. And he remembered how he had kissed back, in earnest. And he remembered how he had meant it. He remembered how love had felt. Love that had willed him into working for days? Months? Years? That same love that tore him apart, working towards her memory, towards proof, had led him into the purest pleasure imaginable. Her lips.

The memory had no confusion at all, but perfect sanity that cleared his face, his mind, and left him in no doubt as to his identity. He was Septimus Hodge and she was Thomasina Coverly.

The love he had left behind.

The illness – the chill he had caught weeks ago, months ago – was clasping him again, he feared. He stopped working. His muscles ached. He remembered too much, now. He had lit the candle. He had lit it. He had watched the wick flame and flick with yellow. He had passed it to her. He hadn’t accompanied upstairs. At the time, he had thought it chivalrous. Could he have stopped it? No. No time for that, now.

Her eyes were blue.

He thought of them – forget-me-nots under the water – as he sat, shivering, in the hermitage at the bottom of the garden to the house without a name, with the roof caved in and the smell of smoke in the air. He thought of them as he closed his eyes and in a voice unfamiliar to him, he muttered to the air,

“I will wait for you to come.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on an Arcadia fic for such a long time. I've been fascinated about what could have happened to Septimus after he becomes the hermit of Sidley Park - and so this was born. Thank you for reading, and do let me know your thoughts in the comments!


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